Is My House a Sears Kit Home? How to Identify Mail-Order Houses

Between 1908 and 1940, you could open a catalog, pick a house, and have the lumber, millwork, roofing, nails, and paint delivered to the nearest rail siding. Sears, Roebuck and Co. is the name everyone remembers, but it was one of several companies in the business, and it was not the first. Because Sears houses have become collectible, many owners, real estate listings, and local walking tours call a bungalow a "Sears house" on looks alone. Most of those claims do not survive a check of the records. This guide shows you how researchers actually confirm a kit house: what to look for in your basement and attic, which county records name Sears as a lender, where the catalogs are digitized for free, and which popular clues prove nothing.

1. What a Kit House Was, and What It Was Not

A mail-order or "kit" house was a package of building materials sold from a catalog, usually shipped by rail in one or two boxcars. Sears's own archive described the Modern Homes program this way: "Sears provided all the materials and instructions, and for many years the financing, for homeowners to build their own houses." The company did not send crews. The buyer either built the house or, very often, hired a local carpenter or contractor to assemble it on a lot the buyer already owned. Sears claimed that about half of kits were built by their owners.

The package also had limits. Masonry for the foundation and chimney was bought locally, and plumbing, heating, and electrical fixtures were extra-cost options or sourced elsewhere. Sears offered three lines at different price points: Honor Bilt (the best materials), Standard Built (less expensive, which the catalogs said was best suited to warmer climates), and Simplex Sectional (small, simple buildings such as cottages). The earliest Sears houses shipped with lumber that the builder cut to length; pre-cut, numbered framing, the feature most people picture, came later, and most sources date it to about 1916.

2. How Many Sears Houses Were Sold, and Why Nobody Knows Exactly

The figure you will see most often comes from Sears itself. The company's archive website stated: "From 1908–1940, Sears, Roebuck and Co. sold about 70,000 – 75,000 homes through their mail-order Modern Homes program," and said the company designed 447 house styles. The same archive's history page also said "it is reported that more than 100,000 houses were sold," a larger figure that appears to include cottages, garages, and farm buildings. Treat both as company estimates. Sears's sales records for the homes business were discarded years later, so there is no master list of buyers and no way to look up an address.

Sears's old archive site (searsarchives.com) now redirects to the Sears retail website, so the quoted pages are only available as archived copies on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The financing story explains why that matters: Sears lent heavily to buyers, sales peaked in 1929, and after the crash the company liquidated millions of dollars in defaulted mortgages. Sears stopped offering mortgages after 1933 and sold its last Modern Home in 1940. Those mortgages, recorded in county courthouses, are now the best surviving evidence.

3. Sears Was Not the Only Company

If your house shows kit-house clues but matches no Sears model, look at the competition. Dates below are the commonly cited years of operation; individual sources differ by a year or two.

• Aladdin Company, Bay City, Michigan (1906–1981). Founded by brothers Otto and William Sovereign, Aladdin offered kit houses by mail before Sears did and outlasted it by four decades. The company reported selling more than 75,000 homes.
• Gordon-Van Tine, Davenport, Iowa (about 1907 into the 1940s). Also manufactured houses sold under Montgomery Ward's name.
• Montgomery Ward / Wardway Homes, Chicago (commonly given as 1910–1931). Many Wardway houses were produced by Gordon-Van Tine, so their catalogs overlap.
• Harris Brothers, Chicago (about 1913–1960).
• Lewis Manufacturing / Liberty Homes, Bay City, Michigan. Lewis sold kits from the 1910s; its line was marketed as Liberty Homes from 1925 into the 1970s.
• Sterling Homes (International Mill and Timber Company), Bay City, Michigan (1915 into the early 1970s).
• Pacific Ready-Cut Homes, Los Angeles (about 1908–1940).
• Bennett Homes, North Tonawanda, New York (early 1900s into the 1930s).

Many of these companies copied popular designs from one another and from plan books, which is exactly why a resemblance to a Sears catalog picture is weak evidence on its own.

4. Check the Date Before Anything Else

A house built before 1908 or after 1940 cannot be a Sears Modern Home, and a house built before 1906 cannot be a kit from any of the major mail-order firms. Do not rely on the assessor's "year built" alone; it is often an estimate entered decades later. Our guide to finding the year your house was built walks through deeds, permits, Sanborn maps, and directories to pin the date down. If your house was built in, say, 1922 and has a typical early-1920s form, you are in the window and the rest of this guide applies. If you are unsure what style the house is, start with how to identify your house's architectural style; kit houses came in bungalow, foursquare, Colonial Revival, Tudor, and cottage forms, and knowing the style narrows the catalog pages you need to search.

5. Physical Clues in the Basement, Attic, and Trim

Kit-house researchers agree on a short list of physical evidence. None of it is conclusive alone, but together with a catalog match it builds a strong case.

• Stamped or stenciled framing. Pre-cut lumber was marked with a letter and a number keyed to the blueprints so the builder could find each piece. Look on the ends and faces of exposed floor joists in the basement or crawl space and on rafters in the attic. Marks are often faint; a flashlight held at a low angle helps. Other kit companies also marked their lumber, so marks prove a kit, not necessarily a Sears kit.
• Shipping labels. Paper labels or stamped addresses sometimes survive on the back of door and window trim, the underside of stair parts, or the back of built-in cabinets, places the painter never reached. A label reading "Sears, Roebuck and Co." or the Chicago address 925 Homan Avenue is a strong clue. Sears owned the Norwood Sash and Door Company of Norwood, Ohio, from 1912, and some millwork carries that name. Because Sears also sold millwork separately, a label on one door proves less than labels throughout the house.
• Goodwall. Sears sold its own sheet plaster, an early wallboard, under the name Goodwall. Finding it, usually stamped on the back of a panel visible in an attic or behind removed trim, points toward Sears.
• Plumbing fixtures. Some 1930s Sears bathtubs and sinks have "SR" cast into them. Sears sold fixtures to anyone, so treat this as supporting evidence only.
• Hardware and front-door details. The researchers behind the National Database of Sears Houses consider a catalog-matching house with Sears-only hardware throughout "almost certainly" a Sears house, while still not counting it as authenticated without paperwork.
• Original paperwork. Sears blueprints showing a model number, instruction books, invoices, or letters from the company sometimes turn up in attics, in the hands of the original family, or at the local historical society.

6. The Paper Trail: Sears Mortgages and Deeds

The strongest documentary proof is a mortgage. Sears financed a large share of its houses between about 1911 and 1933, and those loans were recorded at the county recorder or register of deeds like any other mortgage. Researchers at Kit House Hunters (Andrew and Wendy Mutch) call a Sears mortgage combined with a matching catalog design "proof positive." The catch is that mortgages were usually made in the name of a trustee, not "Sears, Roebuck," so you have to know whom to search for. According to their compilation of trustee names:

• Chicago office (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and most of Ohio): Walker O. Lewis (1911–1930), then E. Harrison Powell (1930–1933); Nicholas Wieland also appears, mainly on releases.
• Philadelphia office (the East Coast from Maine to South Carolina, plus West Virginia and the Steubenville area of Ohio): Walker O. Lewis before 1922, then William C. Reed (1922–1929), Edwards D. Ford (1929–1932), and F. C. Schaub (1932–1933).
• Kansas and Oklahoma: Walker O. Lewis and Nicholas Wieland.

Search the grantee side of the mortgage or general index for those names and for "Sears, Roebuck and Co." over the years your house was built. When a buyer paid off the loan, a release was recorded; when a buyer defaulted, a foreclosure deed often shows the trustee and then Sears, Roebuck as owner before the house was resold. Our guide to tracing a property's deed history explains how grantor and grantee indexes work and how to read old legal descriptions.

Two caveats. Not every Sears buyer borrowed from Sears; cash buyers and those who used a local bank leave no Sears name in the records. And building permits are a second paper source: some permits list "Sears, Roebuck" as the architect or supplier. Our guide to finding original blueprints and building permits covers where permit records survive.

7. Aladdin Has Something Sears Does Not: Surviving Sales Records

If your house might be an Aladdin, you are in luck. The Aladdin Company's records, donated in 1996, are held by the Clarke Historical Library at Central Michigan University, which describes them as a full set of the company's sales records and states that the records are open to the public. The library reports more than 60,000 individual sales records. The Clarke has also scanned most of Aladdin's annual catalogs and put them online. No public, searchable database of Aladdin buyers by address was available when this guide was written, so contact the library's reference staff with the original owner's name, the town, and the approximate year; the original owner's name, from your deed research, is the key that unlocks a sales file.

8. Matching Your House to a Catalog Model

Once you have physical or documentary clues, the final step is a model match: the same footprint, room arrangement, window placement, porch, roof, and dimensions as a specific catalog design. Remember that buyers could reverse the floor plan, swap wood siding for brick, add a dormer, or enlarge a porch, and that decades of remodeling hide the rest. Free places to find the catalogs:

• Building Technology Heritage Library. This collection at the Internet Archive, built from architectural trade catalogs and house plan books before 1964, includes Sears editions such as Our Book of Modern Homes and Economical Standard Built Homes, along with Aladdin, Liberty, and other companies' catalogs. Browse or search the full collection by company name.
• Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware, holds Sears catalogs and those of Aladdin, Gordon-Van Tine, Harris Brothers, Pacific Ready Cut Homes, Sterling, and Wardway; see its overview of its mail-order house catalogs.
• Researcher sites. Kit House Hunters publishes model identifications, mortgage research, and trustee lists; Sears House Seeker and Sears-Homes.com post model-by-model comparisons of real houses with catalog pages; and the National Database of Sears Houses lists houses by model and marks which have been authenticated with primary sources.
• Books. Houses by Mail: A Guide to Houses from Sears, Roebuck and Company by Katherine Cole Stevenson and H. Ward Jandl (Preservation Press, National Trust for Historic Preservation, 1986) reproduces catalog images of Sears models and remains the standard reference. Rosemary Thornton's The Houses That Sears Built and Finding the Houses That Sears Built are aimed at homeowners. Most public libraries can get these through interlibrary loan.

Many kit-house researchers will look at photographs and a floor sketch and tell you whether a match is plausible. Send clear photos of all four sides, the porch, the roofline, and any marked lumber.

9. Myths That Mislead Homeowners

• "Every bungalow on this street is a Sears house." The National Database of Sears Houses estimates that only about 2 percent of houses built in the kit-house era were kits of any brand. Plan-book houses, lumberyard designs, and builder houses look the same from the sidewalk.
• "My grandmother always said it was a Sears house." Family stories often blur Sears with Aladdin, Gordon-Van Tine, or a local lumber company, or confuse a house built with Sears materials with a catalog model. Treat the story as a lead, not a finding.
• "Sears built it." Sears shipped materials and sold mortgages. The builder was the owner or a local contractor, whose name may appear on the building permit.
• "The rafter spacing, room sizes, or nearby railroad prove it." Researchers reject all three. Matching room dimensions, joist spacing, and a rail line in town are common to many non-kit houses.
• "There's a Craftsman part number on the furnace or faucet." Sears sold fixtures, tools, and millwork to anyone. A Sears-brand product shows a purchase, not a kit house.

10. Assembling Your Documentation

Whether your answer is yes, no, or "probably," write it up. A good kit-house file includes: the construction date and the evidence for it; the deed chain and any mortgage or release naming Sears or a trustee (copy the book and page); the building permit if it survives; photographs of stamped lumber, labels, and hardware with notes on where each was found; and the catalog page you matched, with the edition year and a side-by-side photo. Our hub guide to researching your home's history shows how to fit this into a full house history.

Give a copy to your local historical society, which may be tracking kit houses in town; some local governments have run kit-house surveys, such as the Sears mail-order house survey published by the Prince George's County, Maryland, planning department. Kit houses are evaluated for the National Register of Historic Places like any other house: by age, significance, and integrity. A well-preserved, documented kit house can be listed individually or count as a contributing building in a historic district, and several have been. Being a Sears house does not by itself qualify a house; our guide to getting a house on the National Register explains the criteria.

Tips for Kit-House Research

• Get the original owner's name first. It is the search key for mortgages, Aladdin sales records, permits, and newspaper notices.
• Search all the trustee names for your region. Searching only "Sears" in the grantee index misses most Sears mortgages.
• Photograph marks before you renovate. Stamped joists and labeled trim disappear behind drywall and in dumpsters.
• Compare more than the front. Side elevations, window counts, and chimney placement separate look-alikes from true matches.
• Keep "probable" and "authenticated" separate. Serious researchers reserve "authenticated" for houses with a primary source, such as a mortgage, blueprint, label, or permit.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can I tell if my house is a Sears house?

Confirm the house was built between 1908 and 1940, look for letter-and-number stamps on exposed joists and rafters and shipping labels on the back of trim, search county mortgage records for Sears, Roebuck or its trustees between 1911 and 1933, and match the house to a specific model in a digitized Sears catalog. A floor plan match alone is not proof.

How many Sears kit homes were sold?

Sears's own archive said the company sold about 70,000 to 75,000 homes from 1908 to 1940, while another Sears archive page cited reports of more than 100,000 units including smaller buildings. Both are company estimates; the sales records were later discarded, so no exact count exists.

Does Sears have records of who bought its houses?

No. Sears's sales records for the Modern Homes program were discarded years ago, and the old Sears Archives website now redirects to the retail site. County mortgage and deed records naming Sears or its trustees are the best surviving substitute. Aladdin is the exception: its sales records survive at the Clarke Historical Library at Central Michigan University.

Does stamped lumber prove my house is a Sears home?

It proves the framing was pre-cut, which strongly suggests a kit, but Aladdin, Gordon-Van Tine, and other kit companies also marked their lumber. Combine the marks with a catalog match and, ideally, a mortgage, label, or blueprint to identify the company.

Is a Sears kit house automatically historic?

No. A kit house is evaluated for the National Register of Historic Places like any other house, on its age, significance, and integrity. Some documented kit houses have been listed individually or as part of historic districts, but being a Sears house does not qualify a house on its own.